The Fabric of Caroline
by Carson21917
Summary: A different series of events might alter Caroline and Kate's realities. Complete.
1. Chapter 1

Caroline reclined with the many strokes of midnight. Claimed her languor against the headboard. Leather, rough. Smelling of pasture and peat despite the time passed since its arrival in her home. Tanned and turned to a backdrop to witness humanity's prolific expressions of lust. Her expressions of lust. Love, if it suited her.

Satisfied completely. Filled and fulfilled.

Stage right. Mahogany hair cascaded over royal amber vellum, stretched taupe over muscle.

Caroline's stage. The silent mattress a plane to suffer her passions. Blistering footlights illuminating her demands. The play-act and pretend. Not the pretend. The unrevealed. She could be, do, say, live her mind here and find compliance. Speak her truth during the performance. Any evocation she could conjure to cavort under lips and fingertips.

Stage left. Silken sheer strawberry tossed over winter wheat skin. Lids over syrupy eyes.

The three goddesses. Was Paris ready? They'd be less without the voyeur. The joy of her performance banal, sans pleasure of seeing while being seen. Stealing back the stolen. The frisson denied the watcher for the denial of the forbidden in the viewing of the tableau.

The prohibition was just. The mortal, instead of offered reward, ought to be punished for daring to witness them and agree to weigh their radiance. Caroline's radiance. The composer, bard, architect. She was the war itself. The incarnation of destruction not the object. To be claimed by no man.

Not by no one. The goddesses might abdicate. Creep under veiled night like quick ivy from Olympus to covet and be coveted only by each other. Another play for another day to be ingrained in the fingerling cracks of the worn hide of her fourth wall. Or - now?

Perhaps not satisfied.

Caroline rolled to her right. Slid cell by cell over her newest partner. Membranes meeting. Walls ripped. Beneath the vivid, below the cellular, quantum worlds burst forth to thrive and disappear. Pockets of space time made, destroyed. By her. Her greed creating infinite universes inside organic reactions to die like cold stars between millimeters of thawing flesh.

Firm bold hand. Waiting warm breast. Caroline stiffened and relaxed. Clutched and yielded. A kiss now on the shoulder. Not her mouth. She turned to her left. Smiled. Pickets of white teeth shining. Ravenous as the next woman pulled her hand from one body to be welcomed by another, and Caroline –

Awoke.

Alone. But not alone. John. No elements in him, on him, sweet as the skin of the fruit she'd tasted in her dreams.


	2. Chapter 2

Caroline crossed her legs and with her thumb fanned the tome of a conference brochure. Two lectures remaining in the afternoon session.

 _Pedagogical Environments in Chemistry: Effects on Girl's Self-Efficacy Beliefs – Dr. Diana Poole, British Educational Research Journal, July 2016_

 _Advantages of Using Innovative Technological Tools to Teach Chemistry in Primary Schools – Dr. Caroline Elliott, National Foundation for Educational Research, December 2015_

Stage right, the woman sitting next to her and next bound for the podium looked toward the speaker then leaned in toward Caroline. No sense of personal space. Or, the sense, disregarded.

"This is bullshit."

Caroline disregarded the disregard and leaned in to her, both watching the audience from the wings. "Absolute nonsense."

"She's shagged her way here."

Her breath smelled of anise and her thick raven hair of sandalwood – and – smoke? How much back and forth would Caroline indulge? No reaction.

She put her charcoal eyes on Caroline. "Maybe I shouldn't have said that."

"Maybe – not."

"You're the one shagging her, then?"

"No."

Open evaluation. "That's too bad."

Spinning up. A reaction was warranted. Earned. "Is it?"

"No."

Caroline stopped watching the audience and smiled at Diana Poole. Actions and reactions. New combinations of elements. An unexpected compound.

The woman they dissected laughed at a bad joke from an attractive man in the audience. Questions, the worst part of any lecture. Waves of onlookers missing the point. Highlighting their ignorance in their preamble, often an attempt to peacock their own point following. _"I might have missed something in your talk, but…."_

A petite girl tapped Diana's shoulder. "You've about five minutes, Dr. Poole."

"Thank you."

"I've read your paper, Diana." Dr. Poole had not shagged her way into the room. Her findings and conclusions concrete, considering the presence of the social sciences. Her citations were meticulous. No equivocation in her statements. Unafraid. Academically brash. Rare.

"Three minutes, Dr. Poole."

"Haven't read yours. Just caught the abstract."

Spinning down. Reaction. "Perhaps you'll stay for my lecture."

"One minute, Dr. Poole."

"Are you here in Cambridge tonight, Caroline?"

Yes. "No."

"That really is too bad."

Applause filled the auditorium. The laughing woman exited stage left.

Diana reached past her crisp pinstripe shirt, under her black suit to the inner pocket. From it she pulled an exquisite pair of round crimson glasses and one business card, which she handed to Caroline.

"I've drinks with a colleague when I'm done. Miss your lecture. Sorry."

Diana was called from above and welcomed. Center stage.

Caroline crossed her arms and flipped the card finger to finger, considering the woman in the footlights.


	3. Chapter 3

Different factors might spin time's arrow disparately across the clocks but for the perpetually uniform nature of her expanding universe. Three tales of time on the oak bookshelf in Caroline's sunny office. Identical facades with unique catalytic drivers. Wound, solar, hard-wired. Acted upon by human hand. Acted upon by divine hand. Acted upon by invisible hand.

Past, future, present aligned. Perfectly.

"Caroline?"

"Yes Beverley?"

"It's ten a.m."

"It is. Send Kate in, please."

 _Dilettante._

Her – or Kate? No one. A random element acting upon another random element in her sea of crackling neurons.

 _Dilettante._ This time, not random. She dabbled in sweet Kate to taste the possibilities. Nibble and roll them across her palate. Did she savor?

"Caroline?" A dip of the neck, a curve of curiosity and a call to the absent head teacher.

"Yes hello." She often found that in this present she lost focus. Attention wandered but time always aligned, forward.

"You wanted to see me?"

"Yes. Have a seat." Dabble dabble. "It's off, Kate." She cocked a hip to the side and shuffled papers. She spilt the air forward and back, gold-rimmed glasses in hand. Easier to be brusque. "With us."

"Caroline." No ingratiating dip. A thrust back, disbelief and crossed arms in the red cardigan.

"I'm very – fond - of you. I'm just not sure it's me. If I'm ready to go – there."

A lie earth-shattering in its energy. Billions of atoms of readiness vibrated inside Caroline. A fever of electrons spinning up and down orbiting a nucleus of denial making her skin crawl, her hair stand on end when she thought about -

"What is you then? Someone else? John?" Sniffling, Kate made it simple. Tensed, working jaw, harder. Liquid brown disdain, difficult.

Caroline had evaluated their periodic table. Experimented with their combinations. Kate's reactivity, high. She could become any number of compounds. She'd taken from and quickly changed in Caroline's presence. Rubidium.

"Not John. John's an obligation." Low reactivity. John did not change. John was lead.

"But after what he's done? And what you've said?" Kate. Turned to the side, in profile.

What had Caroline become? Become? Caroline was iron. Bound. Perhaps not the _most_ stable.

"I meant what I've said to you."

 _Ring._ The clanging of the bells. The turbulency keeping time. Keeping Caroline from expiring in the awkward moment.

"I've got to go. I've got 9F."

"Bad luck. I'm sorry." She was. "I am. Sorry." Family, the boys, came first.

Kate departed soundless. Caroline sighed and rearranged the paperwork of her infinite half-life.

Beneath a pile of colorful organizational charts, a business card. Medium stock. Crisp. Sharp squared corners. Solid navy back, neat gothic lettering front. She thought she'd thrown it away.


	4. Chapter 4

Moonlight shining. Wind raging. It might break her chimes. They'd broken before. Caroline had restrung them herself. Handy with tools and quick to understand mechanics and repair, it would not be a problem. She imagined their music as the incarnate resonances of atoms crashing. Catalyst, reaction, destruction, creation.

Outside, the metal chimes hung from strands of gravity and were plucked. Each twang disrupting the flow of time with their pulls of different lengths. The past long and supple, present tightly strung, future loosed to nothing. Her chimes rang and clanged in the black tempest. A lure. A snare of memory. The chimes, a gift.

' _I am. Sorry.'_

Where was Kate now? Did her thoughts of Caroline smother everything like the blanket of night, the way Caroline's of her did?

The ceiling of the bedroom soared above her. Yellow walls waiting to be shredded by insomnia surrounded her. Bed empty to her right and to her left. Was it possible to be magnificent alone? Without Kate there to define it. Was it the intensity of her blue eyes, whisper thicket of silken blonde hair, hard chin, speckled neck, full breasts and swishing hips? Or was it her quick mind, quicker mouth, good taste, foul humor, unwelcome sarcasm, waiting wit and dusky, illusive vulnerability? She could not know the formula without the notes of the one who first discovered it.

Useless. She turned her mind, her head, then her body. Still the night beyond the walls. Rapping branches on the windows with the hollow howl of the wind. She grabbed her mobile. Kate would answer, but she didn't want to ask permission to use. Instead, binary-

 _Where are you?_

 _Home_

 _Alone?_

 _No._

Never alone. Caroline may be the core of Kate's thoughts, but she orbited Diana's. Undecayed. Swelling. Further today from the center to be sure.

Diana. Kate. Two theories that made perfect discrete sense within themselves. Irreconcilable together, leaving Caroline un-unified to try again.

"Caroline I said I'm not alone."

"If there is a God particle, must there be a God? Have we betrayed our method?"

"God is in all things."

"Shut up."

"I'd better. I told you I've got someone. You'd like her."

"I don't care. Talk to me. I'll picture you here. We'll exist together and separately. Simultaneously."

"It's too late for quantum."

"Should we ponder reality?" A finger at her lips. French tip of her nail against teeth.

"Ponder fast."

"If you _will_ exist in a future state, as I see you now, in my bed, then - real." Caroline did see her now. Them. Together. Supine, a Rodin of white and olive flesh.

"You can't observe me in your bed. Hasn't happened. Isn't happening. Can't say if it will ever exist independent of your mind. Stricter reading, excluded - not real."

"Perhaps it's just that you don't comprehend my ability to make the reality I desire. Reality exists beyond comprehension."

"The scope of your desire is atomic space."

"Imperceptible? You bitch."

"No. Dense with opposing forces."

"Mmmm. Better." The invisible hand raced across Caroline's skin and skittered to her toes.

"Thanks for the warm up." Lurid silence over the line. "Go back to Kate."

Caroline chucked the mobile to the foot of the bed.


	5. Chapter 5

Go back to Kate.

The crack of an egg, hissing and popping in the pan. Glistening white and yellow cheer against the black. Cracked eggs, a one way ticket. Never to be put back together. In this universe, the arrow flies straight. Fundamental principal.

Fundamental truth - cracked eggs should be fried in butter. Other fats muddled the flavor. Overpowered the delicate base and citrus balance.

"One or two? Or three?"

"Oh one is fine, thank you Caroline. You're too used to feeding boys."

"They're machines. Same as infants, a continuous process. Food in and – "

"At least they can take care of the rest themselves by now."

"You've not had to wash Lawrence's underwear."

"I haven't. Is that part of the bargain, moving in here?" Delicious scrunch of the nose from delicious Kate and a giggle. Mornings with Kate. Were they all replete with sunshine, or did they only feel that way?

Time to put in the toast. Jam from the fridge. The blackberries she'd hunted and found this summer could have no other purpose. Full and ripe. Polysaccharide backbone. Binding blackberries. She'd cared for each little chain by hand in her immaculate kitchen chemistry lab. These had become rich preserves. Divine with tenderloin.

Right, Kate - "You'd never stay if Lawrence's wash were part of the bargain."

"I don't know." Dark lazy finger over the dark wood counter top. "Can't be worse than nappies." Circling the coffee cup, finger trailing. Circumspect. Kate's head down. "And I've signed up for that. You've – we've, signed up – for that, haven't we?"

"Yes, we have." Caroline's laugh edged, metallic. Iron.

She set down the spatula. Picked it back up, flipped the egg. Don't forget – just a minute. Kate prefers them soft. She wiped hands over her worn red-striped apron. Turned to Kate who'd found Caroline's attention. Palms flat on the counter. Head at fifteen degrees, chin out. A new substance to her reality, 'I still can't believe you're here in my kitchen' love in her veins. In every molecule.

Shy Kate. "Do you really want one? A baby, I mean?"

No. "Yessssss. Of course. It'll be wonderful." Babies hadn't crossed Caroline's mind in ten years. This came yesterday as a brand-new input. A significant alteration to the chemistry. An inhibitor? Maybe. But. Caroline wants Kate. Kate wants a baby. Caroline wants a baby. Transitive fertility.

"You don't - want to. Have one. Do you?" Stutter step speech when she wasn't sure. Feeling Caroline out. Classic Kate.

"Noooo. Yes. I do. It's just not something I'd thought about recently." Don't forget the egg. Soft, easy on to the plate. Perfect.

"Well I do, want a baby. You know I do. And I will – have one." Firm eyes. Firm mouth. Firm body. For now. Caroline leaned her elbows on the counter, staring up and adoring. Answering the questions written on her face with a completely confident expression. The spread of the hips – it would suit Kate. Both of them to be Rubens, years from now. With a child.

 _Ding._ The toast. Time to eat.

"I know you will, Kate. But I'm late to school already and so are you. So let's not dwell."

"Alright."

"Lawrence! Breakfast! Now!"

Petulance personified shuffled in. Head down. No eye contact available for them, the lesbians.

Genuine lesbians. Not the lazy finger in the dyke brand from Caroline's school days.

"Are you riding with me today? If yes, you have five minutes."

"Nah. Angus."

"Fine." Pinched look to Kate and a smile. Teenage boys. She and Kate, conspiring to endure and educate them. Lawrence – not 9F. Certainly cut from the cloth. Highly reactive. Explosive. Hard to handle. Flourine.

Plates and pans dirty, family well-fed, plates and pans clean. On to the next nine hundred dependents.

"So I'll meet you there?" Kate lingered.

"Yes." Caroline breezed by. A hand across the back and a peck on the cheek. Wait. Not satisfied. All the years of emaciated, one-dimensional dreams. The ravenous clitoris sustained by thin imaginings. Try again. A hand over the hip and an open mouth. Tongues and noses combined and the taste and smell of eggs and coffee, toast and jam. Just enough for Caroline. Controlled reaction.

Caroline sees Kate wants more and leaves her wanting. Leave more for later, later with Kate is as inevitable as Caroline's desire for it. Time moves one way. Now, satisfied. Satisfied for now.


	6. Chapter 6

Caroline's left breast ached.

It wasn't entirely unpleasant. Not a reminder of Kate, exactly, but a reminder to remember. To feel guilty. It was not a remnant of Kate. It was, rather, the mark of Diana. She had left a mark. It was blooming. Caroline had checked. In the loo. She'd locked the door of course. Only for a minute. It seemed like an hour weighed by the bloat of her conscience, but time is relative.

As she listened to her colleagues drone, surrounded by dust motes and cherrywood panels and literature, she ached. The cadence of her heart served the ache. The ache served her desire. She'd come before she'd intended last night, Diana's mouth over areola. Not controlling the reaction had caused a chain reaction. Synergism. Diana's moans fed hers until the force of her own pleasure forced Diana's, reinforcing hers – and now, aching breast.

Droning colleagues to be quieted, so that she might return to wondering why she should feel guilty. There was not Caroline and Kate, after all. Not in this present.

"That's not at all what it means, Simon. Glowing reviews from the past two schools in the past three years means one thing. They're pawning him off."

Last term their decrepit oracle of all things philosophical had retired. The woman filling in was pleasant. The students had never suffered such droll daydreams.

Time and the inane discussion moved one way but Caroline had slipped the stream. Watching from the banks of the river that reflected a recent past. Her pain defying the flow of time and bringing last night to the present. Keeping focus on the faculty. Difficulty – high.

Last night, present again. Caroline brought to her knees. Not descending in supplication but rising in ecstasy. Head bent resting on leather headboard. Diana down, mouth up, wrist deep. Caroline high above, mind out of place and time. Completely filled, almost fulfilled. Pushing back against the inevitable until -

Focus, Caroline.

"But he's brilliant. Caroline, listen. The parents will love it. He lectures and it's Sartre and Foucalt having coffee as told by your second cousin. The one who makes you wonder if it's fine to shag family if they're twice removed and you'll never have kids. The mothers will want to screw him and the fathers will want their sons to be him."

The woman with the bruise on her breast, the arbiter of morality. "Simon don't be vulgar."

"You take my point though."

"Colorful as it was, yes." Pretentious ass though he was, yes. Incorrect pretentious ass, as well. She'd seen the man in question teach before he lowered himself from University. Another bad sign, his descent. Simon was wrong. It was more Sartre and DeBeauvoir. Much more -

Seductive.

She'd been pushing back against Diana and the inevitable last night and lost. And now she was –

Alone.

Kate. Off again. She had not meant to spread the black tendrils of her internalized homophobia loathsome throughout the bucolic bed and breakfast for any newly out and proud Sapphic wonder to stumble over. It takes energy to change the composition of matter. The inertia of their relationship hadn't yet generated sufficient inputs to convert her to sporting rainbows and shaving her head. But that was not the point. Kate wanted more. Caroline wanted Kate. Caroline needed to give more. Caroline had not given more.

"So my point is, he's brilliant. Feather in the cap here at Sulgrave Heath."

More like feather in the – no – that didn't work. "More like pain in my ass. Perhaps instead we can purchase an orangutan to throw shit at the walls and save me time cleaning up messes. No, Simon. We're not hiring him. Let's move on."

Diana's mark throbbed. She shivered each time she moved, tenderness sliding across the silk of her bra, wrapped like a matron in the blackest suit she owned. She quivered and she ached, but what she ached for was more.

" _I'm sorry, Kate."_

" _That's not good enough, Caroline. Not this time."_

Time out. Caroline had run out of time to change. In a time-out once again when it came to Kate. She had assessed Caroline's atomic weight and found it light. The structure and composition not sufficient for the task at hand. Leaving Caroline alone. To seek the right inputs for transformation. The accurate equation.

Now, in front of her very eyes, Caroline on the outside of the time out, Kate's maternal metamorphosis. Every day. Every moment. Every single division within her a singularity spinning off universes to expand, contract, condense and explode with the next creation until the expansions surpassed her capacity to carry. Every second that passed a world borne, and soon enough a new world born.

The heavy absence Kate had carried in the void of her womb relieved, she walked the halls now divine. Radiant. The glow of inception. Her first days long gone, then the second, the third. Darkness divided from light. The burden of that discovery, nauseating in its force. Solid matter coalescing and dividing within her. Rivers and oceans of blood rent from continents of flesh. Beautifully suffering the fatigue of the cleaving.

No conclusion.

"Our search continues, ladies and gentlemen. Rounds one and two have yielded nothing. Back to the drawing board." She dismissed the assembled searchers.

The somnolent students would drowse on. The fill-in would have to keep filling in. People and papers swept themselves away. Caroline remained. The great library suited her. The hushed reverence and the holding back. The lending out and the return.

Time passed. Caroline remained.

Back to Kate, the downbeat. The smooth stroke of the second and the black ticks on the clock. Caroline the white space, the white noise in between. The measure of nothingness, meaning nothing because she lived in the instances bound between Kate. Off and on. Off and on. Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

Caroline in between. Kate did not want her. She did not fit Kate's formula. She did not fit Diana's either. But Caroline was persuasive. Nothingness was not Caroline. She would not be lonely while alone. Would not drown in missing Kate. She would fit somewhere.

She'd chosen to abandon the nowhere chaos. Diana fed her sense of now. She fed on Diana. Black hair. Black eyes. Arched Roman nose and Grecian skin. Mythic playground.

Back to last night. Caroline had been persuasive. Result, aching left breast.

"I can't come tonight, Caroline. The weekend, maybe. I'll train up. I do want to see you."

"You won't come tonight, Diana. That's what you mean. You won't. If you come over, then you've come. Tautology is on my side. The proof proves itself."

"Your self-referencing reality proves nothing."

"Then make it real. Make it our reality. Be with me."

"No 'our,' Caroline. There is no 'our.' If you want an our, you're back to Kate."

"I do. But that's certainly not happening. Not now." Caroline was done, if Kate were done. "Come tonight, Diana." No please. Diana did not plead. You did not plead for Diana.

Caroline saved her pleading for Kate.

" _Kate I want to spend the rest of my life with you."_

That had not carried Caroline far. As a method to move Kate in, successful. Nothing more. Living in sin only proved love privately. Kate was an old-fashioned girl, demanded larger ovations. Old fashioned at love, old fashioned at fucking. Fucking Greg. Fuck Greg. Means to an end. That was all. Perhaps Kate had been less old-fashioned in her methodologies. Perhaps two things could be true simultaneously. What was reality? Reality exists beyond comprehension.

Kate under Greg, Kate over Greg? Greg over Kate? Her head back. Caroline saw her as she always pictured prone Kate. The view she loved. The quiet cries, the triangle of her chin, and the strain of her neck. Kate's climax on witness – but not by Caroline. The rapture adored as though gazing toward the heavens - by that orange-haired buck toothed pastry.

Beyond Caroline's comprehension. Shattering her comprehension. Re-writing reality.

Fact. Caroline struggled to breath as Kate floated through her corridors here. Fact. Breath was necessary to exchange CO2 and O2 Fact. Caroline needed O2. Caroline would not stand to struggle to breathe.

Hypothesis. Caroline ought to breathe easy. Screw her brains out again tonight with Diana and spend less time pondering absent Kate's realities, chemistries and biologies.

Diana, on the hunt, hunting together with her for nothing pure, left her breathless.

No Kate, couldn't breathe. Diana, breathless. No conclusions. No unity. Try again.

" _I want to spend the rest of my life with you."_

Not enough, not this time. Later with Kate not so inevitable. Not this time. Not yet? Time moved one way. But realities diverged.


	7. Chapter 7

Not back to Kate. Before Kate.

Kate, the singularity.

One William, one Lawrence, one John, one Celia. And only one Caroline to care for them all.

One cup of tea before her thirst in a sun-filled café where and when she did not belong. At home waited commitments made. Not to be broken. But before her sat tea. Delicate china cup. Opaque saucer. Imbued with beauty by the bright blue pattern. Monochromatic expressions she would not have noticed here and now but for the other embroidered details that had so troubled her earlier today.

Today. Not her happiness but her sanity as temporary and fleeting as the tendrils of steam streaming up from the surface of the tea. Evaporation. Condensation. Transition from solid to gaseous. Loosing cohesion, nomadic until nothing.

Happiness and sanity were opposing forces today. Today her mind had betrayed her and composite particles fled from her reality with alarming alacrity.

Caroline was more concerned with the process and prospect of losing her mind than her actual self. Defining herself a much more intimidating task than defining her capacity and her intellect. She had been losing herself slowly for the past ten years. The nice bits, it seemed, evaporating off invisibly day over day until she was left with a desiccated substance of a soul she rarely recognized. Who is Caroline? Mother? Wife? Lover? Daughter? Administrator? Cat-owner? Wine aficionado? None of these? All of these and yet still nothing?

But should she lose her mind, and she must be, what would she do? But more urgently, what would _they_ do? Her three adored grey ones - and the collector of statuary. Cooperating amongst themselves, coordinating and collaborating but ever accomplishing nothing without the cry, "Mum! Caroline!"

William the blind. Turning a lost eye to the malaise of his mother, the inadequacies of his father, the stumbling silent attempts by his mute brother to engage. No affection lost by or for her best and eldest. Where William the wondrous learned his temperance she did not know.

Perhaps John's influence. It was quite possible to hold at least two truths in her mind when it came to John. Self-indulgent but enchanting author. Loving but drunk father. Patient but philandering husband. Blind John, holder of nothing.

Lawrence possessor of the tooth and ever ready to bite. Her favorite. Favorites are not permitted in families. Favor is corrosive. Muddling outcomes and messing with results. William, her prince and savoir, her beloved. But Lawrence, combative, constrained, at times even hateful Lawrence, her favorite, though they were two towers of Babel.

She struggled to decipher his identity, delve below his depths. There was a murky depth to teenage Lawrence. Her intrepid explorer and imaginative engineer. Young builder of cardboard and crayon castles. Homes to invented Arthurian empires and the mythologies of Queen Caroline and Sir Lawrence the brave. Sent on sorties for biscuits to slay the hardwood moat dragon of the kitchen and return triumphant.

She refused to believe a concept as arbitrary as the passage of time had shallowed her brave boy and lost him to her forever. Surely he was too young and fresh to evaporate. Unsuccessful she'd excavated, particle by particle, never making progress. Expeditions to his boorish culture seeking understanding and to translate the native language. Caroline had even attempted the great teenage Rosetta Stone, the Xbox. Her incompetency had only enraged Lawrence further. Her exorbitant chain of expletives had resounded through the home, and she'd happily permitted Lawrence his own. An understandable exception under the circumstances.

Finally Celia. The power to draw you in with her words, lure you from the shadows, and turn your heart to stone in an instant. Caroline's shield was well shined for Celia.

Enter by divine intervention one artful muse. One sweet sprite, laughing light, luscious Kate McKenzie.

Depart, Caroline's sanity. And what made today different from every other day? The witness of a single azure fleur de lis. Simple stitch work at the collar of a co-worker. Caroline, lost. Today, Kate McKenzie wore a shirt she had worn many times previous. Had the flower always decorated the gentle linen resting at the corner of Kate's collar bone? She couldn't recall. The detail had never before been critical.

Today, critical. Today, the lily of the flowering field drew her eye. Drew her world over. Adjacent to the flower and the soft fold of the beige linen, umber skin shone laid over delicate bone.

Laid over that, Caroline pictured her lips. One image. One Kodachrome processed. But time moved only forward and the image made real could not be unreal.

The image, indelible. The very pretty, musical, doe-eyed language teacher and her collarbone and Caroline's lips. Fused in a reaction of imagination and endorphin. Caroline must be losing her mind. Her reaction today was unimaginable. But she had imagined it. Reality, all that has been and is, was not to be denied. Her reaction, real.

Caroline sat alone and silent in a café, no business there. Cobalt flowers and Kate McKenzie, her employee, forever stitched with desire brand new and familiar as the word itself. She could not go home. She would not recognize it. Reality was remade, and from there and here every place, step, sight was brand new.

Brand new was her proposal to Kate after the fateful meeting. Impulse.

"Kate. Would you ever like to grab a glass of wine?"

She had read surprise but had she also read delight? Yes she had.

"I'd love that Caroline. A tapas place just opened up right near me. Should we try it?"

"Perfect. I've been cooped up in the house all week finishing recommendations for the revised curriculum. Everyone and their mother knows what's best for us, it seems."

"Save us, of course."

"Of course."

"Well - Friday afternoon?" Then Kate touched Caroline. Her arm. Three seconds, no more. Three seconds lasting eternity and no more. Delight, yes. Kate. Caroline. Kate and Caroline.

"Yes, Friday."

An open door to another time and place. A passage to a new world through which Caroline had only peered previously. Years ago and far upriver.

This time, in this reality, everyone else would wait their turn. This time Caroline would pluck the flower, bring it to her lips, nose, taste it sample it, savor it and, if she chose, consume it. It was Caroline's turn. Caroline's time.

Before her, a steaming cup of tea. Delicate china, opaque saucer, blue embellishments. Before Caroline, a perilous chain of events. The first reaction, initiated. Could she control it? Given the right inputs, the right balances, the right reactions lasted forever.


	8. Chapter 8

Thirsty Friday. Titanic desert of dry Caroline. The self-ambulating clocks on her bookshelf ticking like sandpaper rolled through her ears. Each mechanical rotation rasp, rasp, rasp. How had time traveled for the trees that had given themselves for her library? Had they forseen their fate? And if so, knowing it, had time accelerated, or had it stretched thin like an empty heart into the horizon?

Even in her dreams Caroline had been thirsty since asking Kate on a date. Date with Kate. Dreams of water. Frescos of the unconscious. Water, water everywhere bathed her mind but not her mouth.

A humid rainforest, close and stifling. Water in the plants, a river, the leaves, the animals, but none for Caroline. Above her a predator. Slithering snake? Creeping cat? Unknown. Beside her a river, but too fast. Muddy and brown. Nothing to capture the moisture hurtling away toward what else, a great fall. Should Caroline plummet and plunge into the river and the fall, she would have plenty of water. Choking and sputtering she would drown in it.

Thirsty all day. Not enough water, tea, coffee to quench the parched palate. There would be enough wine, surely.

The ticking of the clocks. Ten AM. Meeting. Twelve PM. Lunch. Three PM, the bells. Three-o-three PM. Write an email. Three-eleven PM. Another email. Focus, Caroline. Three-thirteen PM. Kate's collar bone. Three-seventeen PM. Imagine the atoms crashing, coursing through the air. Envision their flight. Count their contents. Focus on something. Anything. Other than Kate. Other than the reaction Caroline feels building inside her. Momentum. Three-twenty-three PM. Intolerable. Ready or not, time to go.

Ready? Get ready. What's the goal? What's the process? What do you want, Caroline?

Caroline's dreams were ready. Caroline's dreams wanted. Therefore Caroline wanted. Dreams were reality. They were real to Caroline. She had envisioned them, created them, authored them. Not even unintentional. A part of her intended what she had seen – and done – within them. They did not live independent of her mind - true. Neither did hope, desire, or fear. Each of those were contained solely in her mind.

Yet each of those was as real as the sweat on the palm of her hand holding open the door of the tapas bar for delicious Kate.

"Shall we share something?"

"Yes." Monosyllabic Caroline. Why was Kate so at ease? Dissect the formula. Work backward. Kate at ease. Ease comes with confidence. Confidence comes with practice. Repetition. Kate had practiced. With Caroline? Not in reality. Then again, dreams were reality.

Or – ease comes with disdain. Did Kate disdain? No. She did not. Stars meet midnight in sky black eyes disproved that hypothesis.

Ease comes with practice. Kate had practiced. Had she dreamed of Caroline? She had.

Quick, Caroline. Practice. See it. See leaning in over the high top. See her watch you watching while you traipse the path of her wine to her lips. See your hand over hers. Laugh and smile. Serene. Practice serene. You've been in a liquid state before. Be so now. Be what you want, become it. Have it. Have Kate. Let her eclectic tongue on exotic words speak to you and her fingers on ivory sing to you.

"How's things?"

How to answer. All of it. Give all the answers. Unburden.

Mistake. The unburdening. A mistake. Caroline plead her case to Kate over cured meats and salty cheese, and the pathos ensnared them. A new input, emotion. All of Caroline into Kate, and Kate could do nothing but absorb and change her composition. A change in Kate's composition. Added inputs. A change in Caroline's composition, matter, from subtracting.

Now what was Kate? What was Caroline?

It would take time to study. They had time. John's night with the boys – at the house. She would not permit them to the squalor-infested hovel home of one Judas, rather Judith.

They had time, a walk up a garden path and a front door draped in trellis and dripping with lavender wisteria.

"Would you like to come in for a cup of tea? Another glass of wine?" Yes. Caroline would like to come in. All the way in.

"Tea would be nice. Clear my head a little. It's been a while since I've shared a bottle of wine." Insinuation – Caroline and John did not often split bottles of wine. Truth – Caroline and John did not often split bottles of wine. Meanings diverged. Assumptions made and realities diverged, Kate's from Caroline's. Which was the real reality?

Caroline's reality, tea meant more Kate. They had nibbled the evening away, and in that time, Kate had heard. Moreover, Kate had listened. The more she gave Kate, the more she took. The more she gave, the more Caroline wanted. Synergism.

How do you measure distance? The distance between them on the sofa instantaneously cosmic and quantum. Here though, the rules the same on all levels. Any contact the beginning and the end.

"Why did you divorce, Kate?"

"Most people have a long story. Some sort of slow realization over time that what was once right isn't anymore."

"And that's not you?

"Actually, yes, it is. I just don't want to sound so mundane."

"I don't find you mundane at all." Caroline finds Kate, her languages foreign and domestic, mathematics of music, her contents, all of them, as vast and enticing as her first chemistry experiments.

At age eight she had begun applying acetone to multiple surfaces to discover what would happen. When she applied it to the hood of the car the interaction between the substances was unremarkable. The reaction from her father was not. From then on she would never tire of mixing compounds and discovering reactions. Unintentional Kate. A new repository of knowledge and experience to be explored.

"No? Don't you?" A cough betrays Kate.

No blue flower for Caroline's focus today. Instead, nothing at all. No collar at all. More to observe. Caroline's obsession does not wane.

"What started it going wrong? He didn't cheat, did he?"

"No. I suppose – " Demure. Deferral. Kate looking away, nose and lips in the lamp light. "I didn't cheat either. But it crossed my mind. More than once. Often, actually. And I realized I had to have something different than what I had."

Time to introduce a new element. Accelerate the interaction. "Anyone in particular?"

"Yes."

Billions of particles between them. Air quivering with life, matter. The materials all alive and palpable even though invisible.

"Would you like to kiss me, Caroline?" Lips parted and insinuation and truth collide. No doubt. Kate and Caroline are sharing a reality. Within that reality, dreams converge. Made real.

Yes. "No." Mouth dry. Palms damp. It should be the other way around?

Mouth parted. Not in pleasure. That was not the response Kate expected. Caroline either.

Wait. Try harder.

"I'd like to kiss you. I would." Energies humming like high wires now. Hilarity like madness.

"Then – "

"I wouldn't want to stop." The thirst – the fall, sputtering and drowning in Kate.

Another response Kate did not expect. This time though, no wound opened.

Amiable, anxious, expecting laughter. Time is moving in one direction and the direction is toward Caroline's dreams. Quenched.

"May I kiss you - Kate?"

Out of words.


	9. Chapter 9

A kiss from Kate, and Caroline is tamed.

Not quite.

For the last few months, time has moved in one direction. But her life has not. It is Protean and Caroline is lost. She lies in her wasted bed, center stage but alone again. Naturally? The chimes ring. She cannot stand them. Bose to the rescue. Sergei and his Paganini dull the edges.

Stare at the ceiling and conduct, arms waving with abandon. Assemble the chain of reactions. Search for the fatal flaw among the series of flaws in her odyssey for the divine Kate. Exhausting.

Begin.

On with Kate. One kiss. A second kiss, two in total.

But Caroline regresses. The clocks as witness and time moves one way. She's called it off.

" _This other thing. It's just not me."_

That proof proves false. But that comes later.

So -

Off with Kate. Time for Caroline to grow up again. Return to reality, put her boys first, and make a go. She does love John. Did, love John. John can be loved again. And just like Caroline, he is persistent. John is gum on the shoe. John is back. Back in the house. Back in her bed? Not quite. Back in the house, back with the boys. The family is back. Perhaps for the best. The logical conclusion, the path of least resistance. Reassemble the pieces and carry on. Kissing girls is magical but it just isn't done. It's a fling, it's a lark, it's a way to punish Celia and John and maybe – Caroline. Tantalizing.

Wait. Another change. John is out. All the way out. Caroline taps the main line and becomes – wired. Celia has disavowed sense. Followed her bliss. What's good for the mother.

Blistering sunshine and -

" _Would you like to come 'round tonight, Caroline?"_

There is only one answer to that question.

Meaning -

On with Kate. All the way on with Kate. On, in, over, under, Kate.

No -

Off with Kate. The last supper and someone must be crucified for the sins of the Elliott home. Caroline howls at Celia. Caroline says nasty things she does not mean, because that is Caroline's nature when mixed with Celia. Kate overhears these said nasty things. Kate reacts, equal to and opposite what Caroline wants.

But then a twist in the plot -

On with Kate. Celia in an uncharacteristic change of heart changes Kate's heart. Kate and bliss again her house. In her bed. In her life. A brand new life. Babies and wonder and shaping up to be quite like the past life, minus what hadn't worked. This is the stable reality.

This is it. This is divinity. This is the one real reality.

But Caroline still carries the weight of her prejudices and her past. All the waiting she's done does her no good. She has settled in her ways. Cannot alter the process of her reactions quickly enough.

And -

Off with Kate. All the way off. No baby for Caroline. A loss? A change in her anticipated reality, if nothing else.

On. Off. On. Off. And for fuck's sake, On. Off. Is Kate real? Were they ever real?

Even though there is no momentum, no forward progress, Caroline simply cannot keep up.

Go back to the beginning. Go back one more step in the proof. Return to the very origin to seek the source.

Before there was Kate, there was Cambridge. There was Diana. There is always the unknown that leads to the singularity. The before. Diana is the unknown. Go back, months ago, to the unknown.


	10. Chapter 10

Diana who demanded nothing, except everything, of Caroline.

" _Are you staying in Cambridge tonight?"_

 _Yes. "No."_

Before Kate was on, Caroline was very on. Very on Diana.

Arrhythmic staccato heartbeat. Blood pooled at her core leaving extremities cool. Sitting in her car pulled off the road ten minutes out of Cambridge, mind altered by the most powerful substances not on the periodic table. Lust and anger. Sketching the circular shape of the grey leather-wrapped steering wheel.

"Hello – Diana? Yes. It's Caroline. I've changed my plans. Staying in town tonight. Still care for that drink? I can fill you in on the finer points of my lecture." Flirting. Where had that come from? When had flirting with women resurfaced in Caroline's consciousness?

John's cheating would not make Caroline's right. And that was what Caroline intended by the fifth flip of the navy card across white knuckles. As the footlights shone up on Dr. Diana, Caroline traveled backward and heard, saw, felt again in Diana what could not possibly be. If the arrow of time flew true.

Crisp accent pitched fast, smoothed by association with the right people and the right places. Though if you paid close attention – and Caroline paid close attention – a lowly hard 'r' would sneak its way in during Socratic session. But no matter. It's on you to keep up with the content.

A flare of the nostrils, Caroline filled with the essence of ancient dust layered on polished panels shed by scholars for hundreds of years before she dared defile academia.

From the podium, the fountainhead, intellect reflected in posture. The woman before sweet young Caroline careful guardian, sphinx of demeanor, meter, keeper of all the secrets you ever wanted to steal.

Surely her senses betrayed her today, so many years later. She must be dreaming. It could not be 1990.

Caroline had craved this combination before. She had not only craved but consumed before, been delivered by a doctor not dissimilar to the woman in black and pinstripe. May to September – almost. One graduate advisor, one willing pupil, one summer of Caroline wearing long ponytails and another woman's shirttails.

Tonight might taste of the last century as well. Tonight time would melt, malleable, within her hot hands and blazing tongue. Caroline would be born again. How could she deny it? Should an immortal Flamel himself appear in a puff of smoke and sulphur she would be more likely to turn away his alchemy than turn away Diana Poole.

Reality would diverge. Caroline would slip into the space between. She would thread the needle, dive into the silken pocket, and resurface. And did women count as cheating? Would this? Judith counted as cheating, Judith was a woman. Is a woman. No matter. Her course was set.

The past writes the present and the die of Diana is cast.

"Of course I'm free, Caroline. I kept my night open. I had a feeling you'd come around."

A quiet bar. Two women at ease. Well – one woman pretending at ease. In reality Caroline is floating high above it all, insane observer of her insanity. Two women flirting. There is no doubt. Diana is wholly engaged, engaging. Mind and body and she does not hide it. The double collar shirt that was buttoned to the hollow of the neck this afternoon isn't anymore. Just visible at just the right angle - the lace on the – bra? Camisole? Wouldn't Caroline like to find out? This is Diana's suggestion.

"What made you change your plans, stay over tonight?"

Thirst. Dreams. Denial of her long-suffering denial.

"I enjoyed your talk – and your paper about girls in the hard sciences. Apparently you don't read much, but if you caught my bio you caught I'm head teacher as well. School up in Harrogate. And I'm keen on your work. Love to pick your brain, what you're doing to keep them interested."

New strategy. Caroline gave everything to John and it changed everything. Caroline's thirst was quenched but now she is drowned in salty tears and salt water is corrosive. Time for a fling, time for a lark. Caroline had lead with her heart. This time, Caroline will lead with – everything else.

"I did read your bio. STEM is personal for you." Diana refills Caroline's wine glass. "And this drink is personal. We can talk chemistry all you want. Or not. But if you want my professional opinions, that's on your dime."

Personal, professional, what does that matter? Caroline thrives on multi-tasking. She is talking, she is drinking, she is absorbing all things Diana. Ashy charcoal eyes, lustrous layered black hair just to the shoulders. Thick and asking Caroline to take a handful. Taller than Caroline, not thinner. Larger. Larger than life.

Caroline is no longer twenty-something, a fact she forgets and remembers within the space between seconds. She will not be intimidated. She practices ease. "Tell me about the program you've put together to keep your younger girls from dropping off track. We always lose them right around ten or twelve, and I can't stand it. I try to talk them back into it. I've had them into my office, I've talked to the parents. Nothing works. It's insufferable."

Burgundy wine to burgundy lips. "It takes commitment to keep them." Diana sips and Caroline finds herself very thirsty. "I don't want to mix business and pleasure. I prefer to dive deep in one subject. And right now I'm not thinking about science and school girls."

Caroline remembers this formula. Dredged from dusty notebooks of long ago, sharpened pencil and blue-lined graph paper and her own shorthand. Knows what inputs speed and slow reactions. And she intends a slow reaction. She will savor. She will. "Even the good ones. Pulling top marks and they just turn their backs and pick up a paint brush."

"Or a pen." A smile now, matching strides, and the pace is even.

Caroline checks her slim silver watch. They've finished their wine. The sun has gone down, and the moon has come up.

"You have somewhere else to be?"

"Yep."

* * *

"I'm ravenous." This is true. Caroline was ravenous hours ago, is still. The first incarnation of hunger solved by her mouth, and conveniently, the second would be as well.

"I need a cigarette. Two. You've been saving up." Diana in the champagne moonlight. Solitary tattoo on silhouette. Stag at the shoulder blades.

"It's late. Takeaway?" Caroline has regressed. Not years. Decades. Nubile and tastes toward the impoverished to reflect it.

"God no. I know a place. Greek, and I'll order for us. Their English is shit." Diana plays the elder.

Dinner. Discussion. More than Caroline anticipated? If she gave nothing, Diana could take nothing?

As it turned out she needn't have worried.

" _I don't want to hear about your broken marriage and your man, Caroline. Tell me if the universe will expand indefinitely."_

" _I can't imagine anything lonelier. Everything rushing away from us – the farther the faster. At every moment connection further from our grasp."_

" _That's not an answer, it's a wish. Your science has gone soft. But you prefer the alternative? Racing toward each other until we're stifled? Coalesced and dancing on the head of a pin."_

" _Undeniable gravitational pull binding every atom and all that exists? Each of our existences driving the birth of the next singularity? What could be more infinite, meaningful, and perfect?"_

" _Then over breakfast we'll discuss dark matter. I won't at night."_

Dinner with Diana, souvlaki and spanakopita, and it seemed Caroline knew less about her than ever. She knew more about herself and her world and her thirst changed flavors. She knew that Diana would have her again, but would leave at the threshold whatever accompanied Caroline Elliott. Would take everything Caroline Dawson.

Two heads of school, Sheffield and Harrogate. Two scientists. Two middle aged women with time on their hands and space to explore multiple possibilities.

So began Caroline and Diana.


	11. Chapter 11

Absent stars. Crescent moon. Caroline sees shadows of a cool foreign forest through eyes that are not hers. Irregular murmurs of thoughts not her own, nomenclatures not native, brush against her consciousness. A droplet of water from a silhouetted cypress branch above gleams as it hangs in the thin light. She does not recognize herself in the convex distortion. She smells wet loam and feels the night breeze caress her.

Clutched silence. Then, a rustle in the near distance. A snap of twig and stem and she is no longer stuporous. Mind thrust into acute concert with thoughts she does not understand but instincts she does.

Stage left, paired eyes glitter. Ghostly one-dimensional discs. Flick of the cotton tail from the spotted doe and Caroline leaps. Splits the night like a shot.

Like a shot. Not a shot. She is here to hunt, but not to extinguish. She is here to find blessed bliss in the act of creation. She mounts and –

Wakes.

Behind her, her shoulders pressed to leather. The amber of peat, pasture, fill her nose. Before her, center stage, naked Diana in repose fills her arms. Caroline turns her spent lips to licorice locks.

"You're glorious."

Diana's rumble vibrates through flesh, skin, bones and breast against her chest. "Only in your narcissism. It's wonderful to bask in while the sun shines. I'm illuminated perfection to you now. Worthy. It's stunning, your admiration."

"You're insulting my devotion?" She bristles at Diana's talent, incising praise. The slip of the knife under the caress.

"Yes. Because it's ephemeral. Available only until my inevitable mortality shines through. When it does, the betrayal you conjure on my behalf will be very bitter. You'll resent it and brush me off like a biting mosquito."

Left out in the cold. Blue-eyed Caroline knows the feel of the fall, and frostbite. Tumbling from Olympus. As it felt – feels - with Kate.

Wait. Kate was, is, absolute perfection. She would never?

No matter. Caroline saves her pleading for Kate.

 _"We had something lovely. I know I leave a lot to be desired. I decided it was worth one more time, asking. I would - I will, try harder."_

 _"No. Thank you."_

The open question, her final attempt at reconciliation, resolved. But Caroline is not resolved. Not unified.

"I'm not judging you, Caroline. Today you're my universe."

"Is this nonsense why you won't have a real relationship with me?"

"Real relationship? How would you define us? You and I act and react in relation to each other. I move, you move." Diana's teeth shine like the chaste moon and in illustration, she moves. Caroline gasps. A visceral reaction to recent memory more than direct response to stimulus. Still, she lends corporal agreement to their relativity. Proof proven.

"It's not up to me to decide if this constitutes reality for you."

"Fine." Caroline's body stales and stiffens and she sulks.

Diana laughs. "Is this about your mother's wedding next month?"

"No." She had asked for mercy without hope. Her liaisons with her new lover are defined by starlight.

"Sorry. I won't tag along at your skirt as an illustration or a buttress." Over the past few months she has come to accept and reject wandering Diana's commitment to find a woman worthy of her love whom she does not love.

Precious, reflective, conducive, and weakly bonded. Diana is silver.

Yet Caroline does not want to go alone to the December nativity of the matrimony. All variables predicted that Celia would eventually come around when it came to Kate and her musical charity. No darkness immune to the charms of her lyre. Thus, the Queen of Sheba would strut the aisle hailed and revered accompanied by delicate brown fingers played over keys. Celebrated, as she ought to be, as love ought to be, when wise and well-earned. Well-tempered by balance, by Alan. Caroline would be joyous, muted witness to her mother's joining and Kate's continued beautiful burgeoning.

"Will you meet me when it's over?" Easier to endure the night if Diana waits on the other side, idling in her bed offering sweet oblivion. Caroline would toast the nuptials, then abscond with her lust as soon as polite. Reception revelers none the wiser.

"Are you hungry? Should we go out for Italian? I know a place. The rigatoni pajata - it's like you're in Rome. It will make you sweat and scowl."

"Are you changing the subject?" This time Caroline moves. Creating space. Hands to olive shoulders. Kisses to follow between the blades. With her eyes, nose, then tip of her tongue she traces the multiple salty tableaus that orbit the nucleus and coalesce to form the tattooed stag.

"Yes I am. You can carry the weight of your love for Kate alone. And I – "

"You need a smoke."

"Two."

Everything between them, nothing between them. ' _Love with the window open.'_

Though, Caroline is less ravenous. Her thirst slaking. In Kate's absence – from Caroline's life, not her mind - Diana is bleeding her fury and swallowing whole her hunger. As Caroline loves and lusts it alters that around her, her reality, just as it alters her. But is she bound to Kate? Are her alterations felt instantly across the distance?

Outside the bedroom window chimes ring and memory juts random and ragged as a hidden variable.

 _A tempest._

 _Caroline has craved this combination before. May to September - almost._

 _More like Sartre and DeBeauvoir. More – seductive._

She is under Diana, now. Is she over Kate?

Moving swiftly toward the conclusion of their three fates, time would tell. Would it run classically, absent free will? Or would it run with the quantum, multiple and subject to chance and change?


	12. Chapter 12

December. Cold as Caroline's heart. Outside. Inside, shielded from it all, tucked safely away from the tempest, is the heat. Embers tended and fed to keep her blood warm until the moment winter recedes and renewal might find her. That moment seemed very distant but the fire in Caroline always glows white hot and ready to reignite.

On the outside, cold. On the outside Caroline cannot help her wounded glower and accusing stare fueled by glittering embers. Hidden when she must hide it, but omnipresent and at the ready when her guard is down. While rejoicing at her mother's wedding, the symbolic incarnation of all true love that has passed and will come to pass, her guard is down. It is impossible to be present with Alan and Celia and not fall in love with love. Nor to resent its removal.

Caroline is front row. She is an observer, an audience to others' euphoria. Not center stage. During the ceremony she cannot help her furtive glances at Kate, who is part of the pageantry. Who smiles serene and rapt as Alan and Celia speak of enduring rapture and make vows.

"All that I am, I give to you."

All that Caroline is, she would give to Kate. Why?

Kate is light itself, both wave and particle. These many months as Caroline darted about, unpredictable and untended. Kate the particle provided the vast expanse to do so. Safe quantum of space within the maelstrom of familiar and strange elements swirling. Familiar, John and Celia, reacting with strange, Alan and Gillian. The unprecedented reactions destroyed Caroline's established formulae and symmetries. Entered into her world strange combinations. Alan and Celia. Gillian and John. Gillian and Caroline. Caroline and Kate. Celia and Kate. How could she predict and adapt in time to the outcomes of these combinations, their sizes, weights, effects, and decaying radioactive half-lives? Surely she could not. Uncharted and undone, she collides into them and through them, remaking her universe and remaking herself.

Kate could not possibly measure Caroline's momentum nor position during any of this and does not try. She is transformed by Caroline's chaos to a stable, predictable element made of up stable, predictable particles while Caroline needs space to shed and expel John. She needs space to add elements, explore and understand an identity that had always called but never been answered. She spins violently between it all. Kate accepts the dubious thrown-off gifts of Caroline's excess particles, random bits from random reactions, absorbs them, and waits for the reactions to settle.

When Caroline finally settles, Kate becomes a wave and Caroline rides it to paradise.

Because Kate is also both fluid and solid. While happy Caroline splashes, swims, and frolics in the gentle waves of Kate, she is fluid and Caroline is lubricated. Life flows, time flows, love flows. Kate washes over her and with one touch agitation is stilled. When stilled, wild-Caroline lets Kate tame her and in the stillness all things seem possible, all elements headed toward harmony.

But Caroline herself is the riptide. She is dragged backward in time until she crashes against solid Kate, who will only permit so much of her shit. Solid Kate builds a boundary, and behind it, a house without closets. Caroline crashes into the boundary. She learns from that failure, and learns to appreciate the out and proud revelations delivered by solid-state Kate – though wisdom comes too late.

Particle, wave, fluid, solid. Through off and on, on and off, Kate is what Caroline needs most when she needs it most. Kate is permanence and she is temperance. All in all, she is all things.

All things but one. She is not Caroline's.

Caroline feels small as she holds a glass of flat champagne and stands alone next to a round table adorned with white linen and pink flowers, and pouts. Prurient melodies played over protestations of devotion drone on and people dance. Chin up, lips out, luminous eyes clouded and shrouded and cast down, she mopes and scowls and frowns while surrounded by smiling idiots. Only Lawrence can surpass Caroline when it comes to sullen.

Across the room, someone is smiling but she is not an idiot. Everything opposite. She is Kate and she is stunning in her matronly manner. Simple, provocative, ruby slip of a dress wrapped and tied over inviting swell of life. Unlike Caroline she glows not just inside but out. She has been seduced by the evening. She appears to all the world in love with love, and she is headed toward Caroline.

To say goodbye. She deigns to speak to Caroline only to say goodbye, and in Caroline's shrinking world of pain, the tempest cannot be tamed by separation. She is feral once again and Kate will not allow the touch that would soothe. This will end badly.

"I'm - going." Kate leads with light. Leads with ease and open manner. She is inviting her in. Caroline knows this. She sees the vulnerability and she feels it in herself as well. Kate has admitted this Achilles heel, admitted she is powerless when it comes to Caroline. Because the symmetrical statement is also true and proven for Caroline, Kate's surrender leaves her weak. Too weak to win the day.

All this vulnerability has lead to hurt and she hates it. She fears the weakness and wants to strike out. But she has been warned. She has been scolded and schooled and admonished by Diana, who has bedeviled Caroline at every turn with her constant support for Kate.

" _Call off your dogs, Caroline."_

She shelves defiance and falls back on gratitude. "Thank you for playing the piano." Voice low and flat and diction tight. Throat tight. Everything compressing. She cannot stand to be solicitous when she is hurting, cannot project in her face or with the language of her body the fire stoked at the appearance of Kate. Those vulnerabilities are the missing pieces, and without them she has fucked-up the formula. Now the reaction is floundering. Dying.

Kate's tone turns cool as her body turns away from Caroline, to leave. One final, courteous missive from the gentle woman. "Have a nice Christmas."

"Yeah – how likely is that?" Caroline snaps. She can only fight her nature, not change it. She reprimands herself. _Be nice._ "Sorry."

The pout emerges once again. She is trying to say she is sorry, still. Kate may be perfection but perfection is accountable and Kate's perfection has caused pain. Though, through meeting its demands Caroline has grown. Embracing this growth, Caroline has asked nicely but Kate will not yield, not even now that Caroline has knelt. It is frustrating and the unfairness wounds her, and she can't possibly keep the ichor of the wound from seeping out. Can't Kate see that? Anyone with half a brain might easily interpret her temper tantrum.

Kate has more than half a brain. More than a whole brain by half, at least.

It is Christmas. It is Kate. Try again.

"You - you have a nice Christmas too."

Too little. Solid Kate's boundaries are built. Caroline has landed herself, or rather entrenched herself, on the outside. Kate is speechless, resigned to Caroline's anger, their separation, and exits.

All is lost. She has shrunk to infinite nothing. Caroline finishes her champagne, says she loves her mother, makes a play-act of joy, and exits. She has Diana, who is everything and nothing, which is better than no Kate and nothing.

* * *

A change of heart. After all, and in all ways, Caroline's freckled, speckled pout is as irresistible as it is undeniable.

"Gillian – have you seen Caroline?"

"Nah. I mean, yeah, but she's left about twenty minutes ago. Sorry."

"Oh."

Regretful Kate arrives too late to turn back the clock. Time has passed. It flows one way, and Caroline has been blown off course by intervening events. The river of reality has rushed on. Where? When rent from the ostensibly real, everything is now possible and equally probable. But for Caroline, for Kate, Caroline and Kate, is anything now possible?


	13. Chapter 13

Diana was wrong.

Caroline did not invent an insult to drive her off. Instead, she realized her own desires. The world turned, the sands slid through the thinning and back into fullness. For months, Caroline telegraphed her pain and ripped hard into her lover, bringing the savage force of her spectacular rebirth to bear on Diana. Who accepted all of it and turned it to fodder for passions that spent Caroline to the core.

Eventually, inevitably, her explosive pain abandoned her and she cooled and fatigued. Caroline knew when to say when, when it came to Diana. Blessedly cool goddess of the crescent moon. Delivering only transition. Never filled and never fulfilled but never wanting more.

"I choose a life on my own and of my own making, Caroline. Alone is not lonely."

Enough of being alone beside Diana. Eventually it was enough, and Caroline called it off. Not as pretense. The play was finished and the end received amicably. Footlights out, curtain drawn, story with the beginning, middle, and finale recited. There was an occasional encore. A re-staging when her dreams turned opulent, when the ache in Caroline screamed for her to moan in ecstasy one more time. But unlike her chimes of memory, there were no strings attached.

Little left of Diana to even write her as reality in Caroline's life. Assignations easily transformed into the stuff of dreams. Seduction, sex, and talk of the intangible. Easily dismissed as fantasy, but for the way the texture of it wove a new tapestry in Caroline's coding. She is simply the sum of her real and imagined experiences. Which are passed with nothing left of the real from her past lives - save the imprint of the moment and the change created by the reaction between realities.

Diana, beginning, middle, and end, consumed alongside heartache like a fine wine beside death, re-wrote pieces of her. The effort and energy expended by it, the study and understanding of the non-union, left Caroline burnishing a new theorem to scratch with sharpened pencil in her graph-paper notebook.

Alone is not lonely.

She had pushed forever on Kate. She had pushed it on Diana, and on herself. She had pushed it on John. She had pushed herself always as part of a compound. Never willing to stand as lone element on the stage of life. But Diana's perspective had perhaps set to work long before Caroline recognized and recorded the effect. Remodeling her while passing lustful, lazy nights of osmosis in the arms of a woman who refused all of her demands, and met all of her demands. Taken her as she was but taken no change on herself, only changed Caroline with her solitary intransigence.

And so begins Caroline anew. Finally settled, set, sculpted and reconstructed by experience. Balanced by deep love and deep loss. Caroline the athenaeum. Caroline, the wise, but always the warrior. In a stable state at the moment - but her essential nature still essential. She is serenaded now by the hoot of the owl outside her window, during her nighttime listening sessions. The chimes she has finally retired. Given, actually, to Raff and Ellie to celebrate the calamity of newborn love and to ring her into the world.

Events had intervened. Kate, eternal, walked her hallowed academic halls blooming with life, giving birth to life, living a life that magnanimous Caroline accepted with neutrality as one she could love on Kate's behalf, as much as she would have loved it for her own. She came to love Kate's little daughter and delight in her first words and first steps when they happened to fall within the walls of Sulgrave Heath.

Caroline, mother, daughter, teacher, cat-owner, wine-aficionado, carried on. In her new world order fulfilled but not satisfied. Satisfaction left her unsettled. Seeking and striving and smiling, she moved onward. Alone but not lonely until one fine spring day, when time appeared to turn backward yet again.


End file.
